James's Journal

I didn't think I went to Subway that often, but the girl behind the counter knew my order before I gave it.. Down to which sauce I wanted and everything.. On the plus side, I tend to go there at a fairly quiet time of day (usually about 11:45), so it makes sense that I would stand out a little more than I otherwise might. On the downside, it's located on a fairly busy street, and gets quite packed at lunchtimes, so for them to remember anyone must be quite tricky. Oh dear...

On the subject of it being on a busy road (I said street before, technically inaccurate, it's a road not a street.. I've been playing with Wikipedia a lot lately (as per), and have been looking up the definitions of things like road, street, avenue etc., with a view to seeing if they're consistent across different places. Certainly Shaftesbury Avenue still has trees on both sides, as per the requirement to be an avenue, Charing Cross Road is about getting from A to B, not about doing anything on that road itself, and Oxford Street is about the shops rather than the transport. It might seem trivial to other people, but I quite like knowing why someting is called ..Street rather than ..Road, or knowing the numbering scheme for the major roads in Britain, or any number of other trivial yet relevant-to-real-life things.. I grew up with the impression that my dad knew absolutely everything there was to know, and I'd like my kids to feel the same way :o)

Okay, got sidetracked there - I opened a parenthesis and then went into a ramble. Technically the smiley closed the parentheses, but still, it feels oddly uneven. But getting back to the topic at hand.

On the subject of it being on a busy road, I find that it's important to eat my lunch sitting by the window, so that I can watch Londoners go about their days.. Today I watched an elderly gentleman walk into the phone booth just outside the window, carefully and deliberately pick up each and every card that had been left in said booth by call girls (or their 'management'), before tearing them in half and putting them neatly into the bin next to the booth. Then he crossed over the road and did likewise on the other side. And thus, London is just a little less full of smut now.

And my final little note regards the woman at the station this morning. The one who glared at me as her ribs were crushed. Up yours. If you hadn't been impatient, and had been less up my arse, you wouldn't have got hurt.

Okay, so explanation.. I put my ticket into the barrier at the station, and it doesn't open. Fail. So I remove my ticket from the machine, as per the process, and plan on going to the gate and showing the ticket, and getting through that way. Only the impatient "lady" behind me has already put her ticket into the machine, and has already stepped behind me in the barrier area, so there's no way I can go back, and her ticket has correctly opened the barriers. So I go the only way I can - forwards. Click! The motion sensors detect that a person has passed through the barrier, and in order to stop anybody naughty from following me through, promptly cause the barrier to close on her.

I believe the word I'm looking for here is "pwnz'd". In today's lesson, she learned that if you respect people's personal space, and don't try to bum them at the station, then you don't get smacked in the ribs by large metal doors. If she hadn't been on my ass, firstly, she wouldn't have put her ticket in before I was even through the barrier, and secondly, I would have been able to get past her and let her go ahead of me. I do hope she learned her lesson - London folks can be so rude, and it's important that every now and again this doesn't go unpunished.

And the breakdown goes something along the lines of - roads exist to get people from one place to another, and any shops or anything on them are just a consequence of people trying to take advantage of the number of people there. Streets are deliberately set out to have shops, and to be centres of interaction between people.

Hm I've never thought about streets, roads and avenues like that. It certainly doesn't apply absolutely here, but it might a little bit (London has a very English heritage, after all).

Back in Western Canada it surely wasn't like that, though. In Saskatoon, streets were east-west and avenues were north-south. In Calgary, it was exactly the opposite (in Calgary it mattered a lot because it's mostly a numbered grid, so you always had to say "7th Ave. and 14th St. SW" or something and people can mentally figure out where it was).